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Breaking: The Complete List Of Google I/O Product Introductions As They Happen

Photos: Gundotra pitches Google’s cloud data center as “your darkroom.” Google’s offering the ability to save photos at full size on Google+. Another feature: Google can choose an edited highlight collections from among hundreds of your photos–say, from your recent vacation–and choose the most prominent, such as those that have smiling people, family and friends, and landmarks (and no blurry focus).

Another feature: Auto Enhance, to make photos look better, such as red-eye reduction, skin softening, noise reduction, picture sharpening, and the like. Another feature provides a motion feature, so a series of photos taken one after another will be shown in a fast slide show. Or a bunch of photos where not everyone is smiling in any one photo will be turned into one photo with everyone smiling. (The photographer in me is wary of all this. But a lot of people will like it)

* New ways to search:Wait, Google still does search? Amit Singhal, Google’s top search executive, outlined “the end of search as we know it.” This includes some existing but newish features like Knowledge Graph, the database of 570 million-plus objects such as people and locations. These objects come up on common searches. Now, Google will try to anticipate what your next search will be as well.

Another feature: Conversational search, which allows you to ask a question verbally and get a spoken answer–until now available only on some mobile devices–will come to desktops. You don’t even have to click the mouse to search; you just say, “OK, Google,” and ask it, and you’ll get a spoken answer.

Google Now, which features “cards” with answers to search queries instead of a list of websites, will now include cards for transit schedules, reminders, music, and other common needs. Combined with the Knowledge Graph, Google Now can provide surprisingly accurate answers, says Johann Wright, a top Google director of product management. For example, she asks how tall you need to be to ride the Giant Dipper, the famous wooden roller coaster in Santa Cruz, Calif., and a Google voice answers: Four feet, three inches.

Only a half-hour left to debut any shiny new hardware, such as a rumored tablet update or even a phone or new Chromebook. Looks like there may not be any after all.

* New Google Maps for mobile: Daniel Graf, director of Google Maps, provides a sneak preview. It’s a new design, full-screen, with easier searching for, say, pizza–you can swipe through nearby choices and see which of your friends (or Zagat) have rated them. Offers for discounts and special products (finally an advertising angle!) will show up too. Google is also adding live alerts on traffic incidents, plus real-time rerouting suggestions. There’s also a new tablet Maps experience. All this will come to Android and Apple iOS devices this summer.

You also can create customized maps that adapt to what you do and that can map locations such as restaurants that your friends like. You can zoom from the map all the way into photos of the restaurant–what Google calls immersive imagery.

* Larry Page: OK, he’s not a new product or service, but here he is anyway, hopefully to say something new. He says it’s key for Google to provide various platforms so developers can come up with lots of new applications. “We haven’t seen this rate of change in computing for a long time, maybe since the beginning of personal computing,” he says. “We’re only at 1% of what’s possible, and maybe even less than that.”

Page also emphasizes that Google should be focused on speeding up that progress. “We should be building great things that don’t make sense exist,” he said. (Sorry, I heard it wrong the first time.) Imagine how self-driving cars will change our life, he says–less road and parking space, more time, etc.

He answers some audience questions–which means we’re not going to see anything new hardware at all, it seems. No one here looks too disappointed, though. Check out the bottom of Connie’s post for details on his answers, which to my ears held no surprises. (But his froggy voice, which he finally wrote about yesterday, sounded stronger.)

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